My gimmick for this year’s work Holiday Party invitation is: “There are lots of holidays in December; we hope you’ll come celebrate some of them with us.” So we went online and found lists of weird holidays, celebrations, commemorations, etc. (for example, I write this during National Viagra Week). So, I’m diggin’ all the obscure excuses one can find for raising the ol’ champagne glass. Veteran’s Day?! How common. For me, it’s Kurt Vonnegut’s Birthday.

And speaking of our holiday party: they found me an event planner to help scout sites, report pricing, and stuff like that (that they did this worried me: I didn’t know I needed help). Problem is, we are a tiny company and we just want to get a bunch of people together to hang out in a nice place, so our party is not a wealth-generating event; therefore we were never a priority for this nice lady. I met with her, described our company, and asked her to look into Guastavino’s for me. She came back three weeks later (a time lapse that annoyed SL to no end) with a couple of suggestions (China Club which, to put it delicately, is not our kind of venue; and the Lounge at the Time Hotel, which is gorgeous by not a sit-down-dinner place), but we went with my original choice. Then, today when I asked her about dotting i’s and crossing t’s, she admitted there was a “hitch”: a $3000 venue fee on top of the per-person charge she quoted to us. $3000 just slipped by her attention??? Isn’t it her job to know stuff like that right off the bat? That is not something that would have slipped by me, even with only 1 event under my belt—over the summer I was probably quite anal about giving the suits and estimate of what the final number would be. I mean, we’re still going to have the party and Guastavino’s and I know it will be terrific and people will tell me I’m a party genius for selecting that spot, but the “event planner” did almost nothing for us, and what she did do she did poorly. The good news will probably be that I’ll get to plan more company events in the future and that will be fun for me.